Treaty Shirts. Gerald Vizenor

the birch and red pine near the lake, scenes from stories in the Manabosho Curiosa, an ancient and obscure manuscript published by Moby Dick. The wide circulation of the erotic monk stories, and the indisputable allegiance to the constitution were the obvious cause of his banishment. The tradition fascists were clearly aroused and outraged, of course, at the sex scenes with timber wolves and bears, and because the publisher was a constitutional loyalist, had collected and nurtured deformed aquarium fish, and earned the nickname of a great white whale. White, the ordinary name of a pigment surely made the poseurs more anxious than the giant whale of fiction by Herman Melville.

      Moby Dick had nurtured deformed fish in two huge aquariums at the White Foxy Casino, conspicuously located near the center of the slot machines. The deformed fish were given names of famous explorers. Christopher Columbus shimmered with four fancy pelvic fins, and Matteo Ricci swerved to the side with huge floppy pectoral fins. Jeanne Baret, the explorer and naturalist, was a bright, sociable goldfish with five dorsal fins. The new gamers paused at the machines and watched the magical motion of contorted fish in the enormous curved tanks. The fish were exceptional, double heads and dorsal fins, triple eyes, bent spines, marbled, spotted, and hideous overbites. The tank was backlighted and hues of blue shivered through the water. The curious fish nosed the thick glass, deformed even more by the magnification, and stared at the faces of the casino losers.

      Moby Dick maintained the deformed fish were the modern art of nature, the fancy of abstract expressionism, a tease and creative crease of ancestry, although the artistic expression of four eyes, or three dorsal fins in natural motion were no more grotesque that the disabled gamers with oxygen tanks on the outside of the aquariums.

      Waasese projected a blue laser bear and several monks masturbating, and other monks shimmered in a natural sense of motion and embraced cottontail rabbits. A monk with wild hair touched the moist underbelly of a gentle beaver. The holoscenes overhead, visions and mirages, and the devious dance of truth on the shoreline, were followed later with an incredible incident of vengeance and death.

      Godtwit Moon turned his head from side to side, and traced with his finger the scenes of erotic motion that clear autumn night at Many Point Lake. Later the poseur was slowly squished to death under the light cleated tracks of a snow machine. No one would reveal who drove the machine back and forth several times over the bloody body of the sector governor. The face was crushed, and the heavy arms of the poseur twitched in one direction of the track, and the chest wheezed in the other direction.

      The elusive pack of feral mongrels moved closer to the snow machine and one by one, patched mongrels and three pedigree miniatures, nosed the mashed remains of the sector governor. Some of the mongrels moaned, others sneezed, and rolled over in the moist weeds. The Bichon Frisé and a hairy Chihuahua whined over the body, and then ran away in silence.

      Many natives had imagined nasty ways to murder the sector governor, but crushed by a snow machine was never mentioned as a strategy. One storier staked the poseur overnight for the wolves, but only vultures might consider his mushy, sour flesh. Moby Dick told one of the best stories, the slow submersion of the sector governor into the casino aquarium with deformed fish. Savage Love thought his body parts should be returned in small plastic sandwich bags to La Maison de Torture Extraordinaire. Gichi Noodin moved for an ironic banquet of cured sector governor on a sacrificial stake.